by Mark Helprin
The Australian not only did not smoke but recoiled from the smell of cigarettes, and could stay in the room only when the Georgian was unconscious or away. They hated one another, and every moment was tense, the Georgian’s knives balanced exactly against the Australian’s pure strength.
When he could not study in an empty classroom and was not out on the sea, the Australian sat under the clothesline, six feet from the track, so he could breathe. In the late summer of ’72, and especially after the Munich massacre, a great deal of armor moved on the rails. Studying in the glare of a sodium-vapor light, pausing every few minutes to do pull-ups on the clothesline crossbars, the Australian would often be incapacitated by the passage of a train. The fury made him as helpless as when he was taken by a breaking wave. In both cases, he knew to stay loose, to wait, and to keep track of his tumbling so that at the end of one ordeal he would be ready for the next.
In the waves, he was upended and thrown forward with the onrush of the water. And as he sat under the clothesline, overcome by the thunder of the train, he was still except for his shaking. But whether in the sea or by the rails, the message of helplessness was the same. There are forces, it seemed to say, that work upon you, that you cannot fight. And yet when the wave played itself out or the train departed, he gathered his strength and his wits, and he began to fight once again.
He was an honest man, and he knew he had been a failure. But he was only thirty-six, and he felt that he had a small window of light in which to make good.
WHEN ANNALISE WAS FIFTEEN, her father had told her, with a matter-of-factness meant to discipline his great distress, of his insistence that after his death his body be burned and the ashes spread on the sea.
A secondary-school student in a blue sweater, she was tall and awkward, the kind of girl whom one suspects will grow out of a stark adolescence to become a great beauty: it sometimes happens. After her father’s declaration—a letter would not have allowed him to comfort her—she remained composed, as if she herself were an old man who had seen everything, done everything, and was easily able to bear the rest.
“It’s against Jewish law,” she said, dead calm, voice flat.
“It isn’t in my nature to do such a thing. Or at least it wasn’t. But your mother and your brother, you see—we presume—were … were carried to the crematoria, and with millions of others they perished in the flames. Whole generations of Jews knew this at the end. Jewish law or not, it will be an honor to follow them.”
“But what if it’s true,” Annalise asked, “and God raises the dead? What then?”
“Annalise, if God can raise the dead, He can undoubtedly reconstitute them even if they have dissolved on the wind. And if He cannot, then that’s just the point: I want exactly the destiny of your mother and my baby son, whatever that was. And, other than your happiness, it is the only thing I want.”
Annalise, in whose large eyes now were the beginnings of tears, maintained her own discipline, as always, and asked, “How do you go about such a thing, in this country?”
There were ways, and he revealed them, but the hardest part would be left to her. “I’m not sure of the physics exactly,” he said, “but most of me will travel upward on a bloom of heat, translucent and light, separated into molecules and perhaps even atoms—you’d have to ask a chemist. I will rise into the air in utter helplessness, hopelessly dispersed. And whatever happens is what I want.
“You will be given my ashes. The best place for them is the sea. The beach at Hof HaCarmel is empty and clean, and it’s very windy there.”
“Papa,” Annalise said, “I’ll be alone.”
“I only tell you this now, Annalise, in case something happens. I plan to hold on until long after you’ve married and had children of your own. I want to see them. It’s very important to me. Perhaps a grandchild, a young man strong and new, can swim out and do this, while you and the rest of your family watch from the shore. You won’t be alone. You mustn’t be alone.”
After this, Annalise would sometimes wonder about the air from the chimneys, whether fine particles of ash rose in the rivers of heat, how far into the crown of the sky they ascended, and if they would, perhaps, sparkle and shine in the sun.
And she wondered also about the ashes and bone that would be scattered on the waves. These she knew would always sparkle, would be kept in motion by the rocking of the sea, and lifted in spray. And the smallest of particles would work their way across the oceans until, eventually, in the evening of the world, they would roll with every wave and break with every whitecap.
ANNALISE was the microscopist at Rambam Hospital in Bat Gallim. Neither a pathologist, a histologist, nor a bacteriologist, she was essential to all three, and she found her knowledge deepening and expanding as medical technology changed to accommodate the advance of medicine toward chemistry and physics.
Because she was meticulous and disciplined, the hospital never failed to elevate, train, and promote her, until, it seemed, in just a few years her position would be similar, though inferior, to that of a department head. She was to the practice of medicine what a sergeant major is to the practice of arms—absolutely necessary, independent, inviolate, and able to retain his position while speaking his mind like a prophet. She was there to stay, and she saw certain parts of the future quite as clearly as others were obscured. The central path that lay before her was the same as it had been when she started. The basics would never call for more than a fine optical microscope and skill in preparing slides. But the road branched off on two other planes. One was electron microscopy, and the other was computerization, for not only was electron microscopy ripe for conversion to a digital format, but even observations in lesser powers cried out for it.
In a decade, or two, or three, she judged, she would be able to store images, view them in multiple dimensions, catalog, compare, and enhance them, all via digital encoding. This meant travel abroad for specialized training. And there lay the problem. She had flatly turned down a fellowship in electron microscopy in Germany. No one at Rambam could think for a moment that this was in any way untoward. They would not expect a woman with the badge of Majdanek to take training in Germany, for now in their prime among the staffs of German hospitals and research institutes, and in the professoriate, would doubtless be former members of the SS, former troops of the Einsatzgruppen, and those whose crimes still lay in their onetime satisfaction that children and their parents had been led to slaughterhouses more terrible than the slaughterhouses for animals.
But when the fellowship would come up in Baltimore, London, Tokyo, or Boston, she would also have to say no. Although neither her career nor her livelihood would be destroyed, she would be held back, frozen in place. These fellowships offered transportation, living quarters, every service of adjustment, and, for an Israeli, immense sums of hard currency. She was intensely curious about the development of the new machines. But she would have to say no.
She could not leave her father. Though he would beg her to go, protest that he would thrive in her absence, and even shout at her when she refused, she could not leave him. He had no one else, only the students at the language academy, whom he knew for six months before they finished their course. And they, in their lessened state, the newest of new immigrants, confused, tongue-tied, and emotionally overwrought, befriended him because they had fallen. When finally they crossed the tracks and left Bat Gallim behind, they would forget him.
They might remember his night-watchman’s cap, a tea-colored British officer’s hat with a green band the color of a fly’s compound eye or the fronds of a date palm in the sun after a rainstorm. They might remember his slight tremor and that he radiated a feeling of age, his slow movements, his undisguised pleasure in their youth, his patience for them. But, then, when they thought of him in years out, they would undoubtedly say, “Oh, I wonder if he’s still alive. He was a nice man. He’s probably dead.”
She could not leave him, not even for six months, he who held her slight body in his
arms for hour after hour after hour, in the times when children her age should have been skipping or jumping or lost in games, and she could not be. He had held her beyond all patience, so that she could feel his heartbeat, and sleep on his chest, and awake, and fall asleep again, knowing that when she awoke he would still be there.
This, he had been told, was wrong. The child needed help after what she had been through and all she had seen. “No,” he answered. “All she needs is to know that her father will not be taken from her. If it means a year or two of absolute reassurance, then that is what it will be. If it means I have to be next to her like a penguin father with an egg on his foot, then that’s what it means, and that’s what I’ll do.”
In far less than a year, when she understood that he would not leave her, no matter what, that he would stay in the apartment all day with her, and hold her hand when they went out to shop, that he was entirely devoted and that he would stick to his task, if necessary, until he died, she healed. And she became independent and strong earlier than would have been expected.
How could she, then, leave him? He was not her husband, and could not go with her abroad, even though she still lived with him and took care of him. She could leave him only when it would be right to do so, when it would be necessary, perfect, and expected, when her leaving would be as if she were floating away in a cloud of benevolence. When she had a husband.
“WHY HAVEN’T YOU BEEN MARRIED?” her father asked the Australian.
The Australian brought his outstretched thumb to his solar plexus, widened his eyes, and said, “Me?”
“Yes, you. Why? Why?”
“You know, I’ve already been asked that around here,” the Australian said, “in Bat Gallim.”
“Who asked you?”
“At the beach, the Moroccan who rents folding chairs. I would never rent a folding chair—I’m either in the water or standing while I get dry. The beach is not a couch. Well, he asked me. I suppose he wanted to find out why I don’t rent beach chairs, so he said, ‘Do you have children?’ and I said, ‘What? Me?’ and he said, ‘Don’t you fuck well?’ That’s Atah lo dofek tov? Right?”
“Right,” answered Annalise’s father.
“And I said, ‘I’m not married.’ And he said, ‘Why? Atah lo dofek tov?’ Come to think of it, a lot of people—a lot—ask me the same question. And I’ve never answered it directly. I suppose if I had, I’d be married now, wouldn’t I?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you answer it?”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
“All right.” He swallowed, cast suddenly into the kind of self-analysis that he, as an Australian, an athlete, and an engineer, was not fond of and wanted to put behind him quickly.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose I could make excuses, couldn’t I? I could say that I didn’t get married in college. Did I? No. I didn’t. I was too young. Then I was in the army for two years, and I didn’t get married then, either. Then I was in graduate school for five years. Oh, yes. When I finished, I was thirty. My father died soon after. I didn’t take it easily: I lost interest in things. That’s when I went to work at the airport. I wanted to be still, as it were, for a while. I can’t say why that while stretched into five years. And now I’m here. I could say all that.”
“Is that what you would say?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because it wouldn’t be the truth. And the truth is, I look sort of like a chipmunk, you know. …”
Annalise’s father did not know what a chipmunk was, in English, at least, which was how the Australian had had to say it, as he himself did not know the word in Hebrew, and Annalise’s father had thought the Australian had said he looked like a monkey. The old man closed his eyes and sadly shook his head from side to side, saying, “A monkey. A monkey,” which was his way of saying, You don’t look like a monkey.
The Australian, amazed, but still in good humor, went on. “I always thought I looked quite a bit like a chipmunk,” he said, “but, all right, I’ll take your word for it, a monkey. And I’m shy. Whenever women have been interested in me—what I mean to say is ‘in love’—I can’t believe it. I realize only long after the fact, when they’re gone, long after I might have responded, which is perfectly sensible, isn’t it? Why would any woman be interested in me?
“That’s why I’m not married. It’s simple. I’ve never believed that anyone would want to marry me.”
• • •
ANNALISE HAD BEEN in the army in one form or another for sixteen years, and this, her fourteenth year of reserve duty, was to be the last. She had finished training and entered upon active service just in time for the Sinai Campaign of 1956. She had been called up for the June War, had served in the War of Attrition, and all the times between, when she would return to the army for however many weeks it demanded each year. But after thirty-four she would be free. On the ninth day of October 1972, she would be released at six p.m. and never have to go back.
Rambam took casualties from the north, and it would have made sense for Annalise to serve there in a medical unit. The army, however, reserved the right to be illogical, and she had always done reserve duty as a clerk in a transport unit in Bat Gallim. This was neither an honor nor a dishonor. The transport of soldiers to or upon the battlefield is just as important as their care after they are wounded, and perhaps more important, if only because a battle won quickly and decisively does more to heal casualties—in preventing them—than the best of hospitals.
The depot was off Ha-Aliya, not far from the language academy. She had come to know its shaded yards, its tin roofs, its trees, and its sheds so well that she needed them. Though perhaps falsely, their idiosyncratic rhythms and physical dreariness promised permanence. Even in summer, it was dark and cool in the cavernous garages and windowless armory where thousands of weapons lay—heavy, black, and oiled—on steel racks, remembering, poised, and eager for war, for only when war came would they leap from their rests and be rushed out into the wind and sunlight.
In winter, rays of orange sun so rarely struck the counter at which Annalise worked that when they did everyone came to look, as if at an eclipse. In winter, the rain beat upon the tin roofs so loudly that the clerks and armorers had to shout to be heard, it was so cold that everyone was draped in blankets, and the smell of kerosene burning in floor stoves overrode the scents of gun oil and gasoline. In each stove the armature glowed like the sun as invisible vapors burned around it.
Annalise and Shoshanna—a young woman so beautiful that half of life was closed to her, as she was always the object, and never the observer—worked together to keep the records. Their registry was the literary repository of jeeps and half-tracks, tanks and recoilless rifles, submachine guns and fuel tankers, water trailers and field kitchens. All these inanimate things had an inflow of parts and a history of checks and maintenance. Done in Annalise’s splendid hand, and then in Shoshanna’s seductive scrawls that, once, Annalise had seen a mechanic bend to kiss, the records filled ledger after ledger on a wall of shelves.
This work the size of an encyclopedia would never be read, and it proceeded according to its own strategy, as if it were alive. But nonetheless the two clerks—one who excited men like a drug, the other almost invisible to men—labored carefully to make their writing beautiful. After all, not that far back in their families were scribes like those of Sfat and Jerusalem who worked not to make something permanent, or vainly so, like stone, but who labored because, as they did, nearly motionless, eyes riveted, thoughts disciplined, pen tip rolling across the page like a boat on the waves, they felt the presence of God.
Annalise could take down a volume and see in handwriting that was on occasion her own and more often that of other clerks, both regular and reserve, something like the hypnotic work that adorned Asian temples, or the eye-crossing design of an Iranian mosque. It was not decoration to which the religious craftsmen were devoted, but rhythms and intervals that, with practice, could shut out
the earthly life.
Even Shoshanna knew, Shoshanna who, Annalise understood, was so beautiful that she was sexually infatuated with herself. This, in turn, put men in an almost uncontrollable state. Annalise found the delirium that Shoshanna inspired difficult to fathom, as she was never the object but always the observer. In anything but desire she was far happier than her friend, but in the presence of her friend, desire seemed to take up all the space in the world. The armorers in particular were intoxicated with Shoshanna, and at the four o’clock break when they, the mechanics, and the clerks gathered for tea, sparks flew. They fought among themselves sometimes, or seemed as dejected as mental patients, or breathed like wounded animals. Perhaps it was that they were almost all conscripts, and therefore both young and unduly confined. Or perhaps it was that they spent their mornings and afternoons pumping cleaning rods back and forth in the slick oiled barrels of the weapons in their charge. No matter what the reason, at four o’clock they were fierce.
But never for Annalise, who was too old, too incisive, and not quite pretty. They tried to use her to get to Shoshanna.
“Annalise,” one once said, “you and Shoshanna must get so cold being still all the time, and, with your hands so full of ink, do you take a shower at the end of the day?”
“Ask Shoshanna,” Annalise had snapped, although she would indeed have loved to have been under a warm shower even with that young armorer, had he embraced her with something even vaguely close to love. But he wouldn’t have had it in him, because, among other things, he hadn’t had the courage to ask Shoshanna the question meant for her.
Tea with the armorers, however, was something that Annalise always liked. They were men, after all, and not a single one was married. For years, even after Shoshanna came, Annalise had looked forward to her reserve duty for this, and other reasons, because the men with whom she associated at the hospital had families, and by the stove in the armory she found flirtation and youth, things that were closing off in her life, and the liveliness of sexual embarrassment and shame, and what she could imagine, briefly, might take place on the empty beaches south of Haifa.
